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Venmo: Understanding
Mobile Payments as Social Media
Amelia Acker University of Texas at Austin
School of Information
Dhiraj Murthy University of Texas at Austin
School of Journalism
ABSTRACT
Payment infrastructures are going through rapid change with
the rise of next generation mobile networks and smartphone
ownership. From mobile wallets to rideshare apps, social
payments allow users to split receipts with friends, charge
exes for breakup expenses, or troll celebrities. New layers of
data, sociality, and markets are being created and influenced
by expanding economic imaginaries, regulations, and
business models leveraging these new infrastructures. In this
paper we discuss how mobile payment systems have become
social media. After discussing the recent history of mobile
payments innovation—SMS, mobile wallets, delivery and
ridesharing apps— we examine Venmo, a social payments
platform that allows users to broadcast transactions to a
social activity stream or public transaction feed. Our
findings detail how transaction feeds of mobile payments
support social practices, communication, and commerce
with mobile devices and wireless networks. We present
findings from a case study on Venmo to develop some
implications for the design, study, and impact of mobile
payment infrastructures as social media.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Human-centered computing~Collaborative and social
computing • Human-centered computing~Social media
KEYWORDS
Venmo, mobile payments, social mediafication, social
payments, transactions
ACM Reference format:
Amelia Acker and Dhiraj Murthy. 2018. Venmo:
Understanding Mobile Payments as Social Media.
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Social
Media & Society, Copenhagen, Denmark (SMSociety).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3217804.3217892
1 INTRODUCTION
Payments are transactions between people. These
transactions support different kinds of experiences that
shape how we communicate, work, and move through
different infrastructures. As such, payment transactions are
embedded in social contexts and involve the coordination of
people, things, institutions, technologies, and practices.
Basic payment systems involve a buyer and a seller, but even
the most basic transactions between people occur within a
complex system of banks, government regulation, supply
chains, competition, values and standards. In the past decade
a slew of new payment technologies that leverage next
generation wireless networks (3G, 4G, LTE) and mobile
operating systems (iOS and Android), such as digital wallets,
tap and pay, M-Pesa, and Uber have developed to create
social payments. Each of these mobile payment technologies
have promised easier, more convenient payment experiences
built on top of wireless Internet infrastructures. Yet, each of
these new payment technologies involve the creation of
documentation, the coordination of more network
technologies, and new forms of data and metadata that
capture the nature of these mobile payment transactions
between people. This documentation captures material and
social practices that shape and are shaped by the payment
encounter itself; these receipts capture moments where
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3217804.3217892
SMSociety, July 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark Acker and Murthy
interactions of trust, value, and goods or services are
exchanged during payment transactions.
With the rise of next generation mobile networks,
smartphones, and payment systems have been moving to
new and different kinds of mobile platforms and
possibilities. As Maurer has shown, mobile payment
platforms are social computing systems that support new
forms of sociality [1]. The social aspects and documentation
of mobile payment systems are changing as they move from
text messaging or short message service (SMS) transfers to
social computing platforms, such as Google Wallet or Uber,
that connect user accounts to encrypted mobile devices.
These developments in payment technology provide an
opportunity for social media researchers, human computer
interaction designers, communication and social informatics
scholars to examine how payment transactions exist in
mobile network infrastructures, and how they support
different kinds of markets, communication, and social
interactions. As such, there is a growing academic and
applied research interest in mobile payment technologies.
Currently, there are more active mobile device subscriptions
in the world then there are people in the global population
[2]. Mobile payments revenue worldwide in 2015 was $450
billion and is expected to be more than 1 trillion USD by
2019. The increase in mobile payment revenue and
technology has become a new area of focus for
anthropologists of money, economic theorists, and economic
sociologists in the last decade. While these new financial
services have been considered from social computing and
computer supported collaborative work (CSCW)
perspectives, most mobile payment market research tends to
focus on their rates of adoption or use of new services. Many
money theorists have discussed the difficulty of defining
mobile payments as social transactions because of rapid rates
of technological change in payments technology, difficulties
in studying trust, and the variety of possible payment
transactions with mobile ICTs, amongst other challenges [3].
For our purposes in this paper, we define mobile payments
as on the edge, or as technology-in-development. We rely on
the work of Ferreira et al., which has proposed frame mobile
payment transactions as: “co-productions at the seams,
thereby challenging designers of payment systems to view
monetary transactions as achievements between
collaborating agents and as opportunities for rich social
interactions” [4]. We too, challenge social media researchers
(not just designers) of payments to see mobile payments as
co-productions of rich, and ongoing social interactions.
In the following paper we present a brief history of
mobile payment technologies, including mobile wallets,
SMS payments, peer-to-peer (P2P) and mobile payment
applications (hereafter called “apps”). After charting a brief
history of mobile payments, we present a case study of
Venmo, a social payments platforms that has a public
transaction feed, also known as a “social awareness stream”
[5]. The paper ends with a discussion examining some of the
implications for studying payment technology as social
media and some research design considerations.
This article has two purposes. First, it contributes to a
growing literature on digital money and payment
infrastructures by examining how mobile payments
technologies like Venmo impact the social function of
money, payment transactions, and app use amongst mobile
and social media users. Second, we aim to contribute to the
critical study of data that comes from social media APIs and
platforms themselves by considering how payment data as
social media should be conceived, characterized, and
interpreted.
If mobile payments are increasingly understood as social
transactions, how are they social media? This paper tries to
provide a framework for how we might go about analyzing
such data as social media phenomena. In terms of cross-
platform payment systems, the innovation of digital cash and
cardless payment technologies like PayPal and digital
wallets such as Apple pay, Android pay, and Samsung pay
will likely be integrated into cross-platform payment
systems or some sort of digital ‘cash’, digital dollars or
bitcoin, that works across platforms like currencies.
Therefore, it is imperative for us to understand the changing
nature of transactions from the banal receipt to yet another
site of consumption where the consumptive transaction itself
has become further commodified through the wrapper of
social media and becomes datafied social activity [6]. The
importance of this should not be underestimated, as it also
speaks to the hyper proliferation of social media into areas
of economic, social, and political life that we may not have
expected to become part of all social media industries.
However, another aspect this paper emphasizes is that
traditional ways of understanding payments must not be
forgotten when trying to contextualize the shifts of mobile
payment technologies towards social media platforms. In
addition, it also might be the case that recipients of the
payment messages might not attach much importance to the
messages themselves. In other words, the sociality of
payment systems might just be a reflection of the social
mediafication of our lives. It may be that individuals have
become quite desensitized to having emojis, likes, dislikes,
or faves attached to everything they do online. Indeed this
social mediafication of these public transactions has
consequences for research design and ethics. These are some
of the questions our paper tries to unpack.
2 A BRIEF HISTORY OF MOBILE PAYMENT
TECHNOLOGIES
The history of mobile payments begins with airtime
credits. Mobile phone users in Uganda, Botswana, and
Ghana began trading airtime for calls on mobile devices,
using airtime as a proxy for money transfer in the early 2000s
[7]. Airtime credit swapping on 2G networks is the precursor
Venmo SMSociety, July 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark
to more formal micro-financial architectures that aimed to
support small amounts of money transfer using the short
message service (SMS) standard available to all 2G GMS
and UTMS feature phones. In 2002, M-Pesa was launched
in Kenya as a microfinance service specifically for money
transfer that allowed users to receive and repay loans
through airtime sellers on 2G networks [8, 9]. In short order,
economic development programs and municipal
governments began to use mobile money transfer with M-
Pesa services for payroll and bill pay. Mobile payment
platforms like M-Pesa and ‘text to pay’ services that
leverage SMS relays for money transfer have been studied
by HCI, CSCW, and development researchers who have
interpreted how these payment systems support talk,
maintenance, and commerce across networks and in face-to
face-encounters [10]. These kinds of early SMS banking
architecture link a mobile phone owner’s phone number and
a SIM card (subscriber identity module) to their bank
account or allow the cell service provider to stand in as a
kind of bank that stores credit.
Such early mobile payment architectures for feature
phones used the SMS standard (GSM 03.40) to facilitate
immediate payment in places that may have been unbanked,
or where financial infrastructures (such as cash withdrawal,
check deposit, or money wiring) were not possible [11].
Some ICT4D researchers have specifically looked at how
mobile money practices, design concepts, and technical
features impact people from rural areas who cannot read or
write but still make use of mobile phones as mobile money
platforms for end-to-end banking [12].
While many financial services have positioned payment
innovations as “frictionless” they are not without hurdles of
adoption, trust, and adoption [13]. Many user experience
researchers have documented the fear and enchantment of
paying with early mobile payment technologies. Early 2G
payments could fail because the user could be out of range
of the network, the network itself could have spotty
coverage, or the point of service device could be slow to
update data transfer [14]. Initiating a mobile payment for the
first time with 2G networks could involve failure, building
rapport with the buyer or seller, and managing conditions
uncertainty at the point of sale. Technical troubles (whether
from buyers or sellers) then build and can leverage social
connections between merchants and sellers. Shopkeepers
may build rapport with buyers by talking through the
payment process, allowing for turn taking of explaining the
system to new users and confirming payment. Thus the
process of early mobile payments brought attention back
payment encounter as a face-to-face encounter, as “[t]he
transaction […] requires users to shift focus between mobile
devices and the unfolding social protocol of a monetary
exchange” [4]. User experience researchers found that the
elimination of cash has led to the use of new mobile payment
technologies, like tap to pay or text to pay, which could also
be fun and pleasurable for users, thus developing new
practices of special monies, gifts, and jokes [4, 15].
Transactions could increasingly be seen as conversations,
particularly as the adoption of text messaging as a new form
of mobile communication began to characterize mobile
phone use in the early 2000s.
In 2007 when the iPhone was introduced, 3G network
rollouts were underway throughout the world. 3G networks
allow for mobile broadband access to the Internet heavily
influenced the adoption of smartphones, mobile web, and
eventually the ‘appification’ of mobile operating systems.
By 2008 mobile payments had diversified in form and
function to point of sale devices, peer-to-peer money
transfer, omni-channel banking, and mobile apps that
allowed users to use their phones as mobile wallets and
leverage contactless data transmission with near field
communication (NFC) or Bluetooth technology [13]. Newer
(and cheaper) smartphones that had more memory,
processing power, and longer battery life could connect
reliably to the Internet with apps, so the payments industry
began to innovate on the experience of paying and
emphasizing more meaningful, social layers of transactions.
Nelms, et al. [13] argue that mobile payments become social
payment technologies when a social layer of interaction
becomes part of the experience of paying—part of the value
transaction itself. Smartphones with mobile operating
systems that support apps are different than payment
technologies such as mobile wallets or tap to pay device
features that are enabled with NFC or Bluetooth technology,
which require the payer to be within a short physical distance
of the point of purchase (at a counter, gas pump, or register).
Payment apps can also connect other user accounts, leverage
smartphone sensors to collect data, or import existing
metadata stored on a mobile phone. By collecting
geolocation or adding a list of common contacts, for
example, the payment can look and feel more frictionless or
seamless across platform features.
With the rise of mobile payment apps that emphasize
social layers, some economic scholars have argued that
seamless payments are a product of the sharing economy.
Payments happen in the background without material or
direct exchange and instead focus of the experience of
sharing a ride or an apartment for example. Payment for
goods are initiated, such as hailing a Lyft ride or booking a
home-stay experience through AirBNB, without the delay of
entering a PIN code, signing receipts, swiping cards, or
counting change. Sharing economy platforms such as
AirBNB, Uber, or Rover (for pet sitting) that are built on top
of legacy payment technologies then insert their own vertical
layers of value and exchange through social rating systems
of the transaction experience. Uber riders and AirBNB
guests can all “rate” experiences and be rated as users. Rover
allows pet owners to receive photo message updates from pet
SMSociety, July 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark Acker and Murthy
sitters and then invites owners to rate the comprehensiveness
and quality of the photo messages.
Where cash endpoints used to be the hurdle for 2G mobile
payments because of network fidelity and the processing
power of early feature phones [16], conventional bank
accounts can now be connected to sharing economy apps on
3G and 4G connected smartphones that exchange instant
payments for services and social ratings as part of the
transaction. Both legal and labor scholars who study the
impacts of crowdsourcing and precarious gig-work have
observed that inhibitors or drivers for the sharing economy
involve the introduction of social ratings or reviews of the
transaction that can be broadcasted to audiences (or
followers), or follow users as part of their transactional
dossier within the platform [17, 18]. Once payments become
seamless or hidden, sharing economy apps can emphasize
new forms of transaction with layers of social engagement.
Both buyers and sellers’ attention can be drawn away from
payment processing interaction (because it happens through
apps on mobile devices), and then focus on generating data
about users’ ratings of each other. This way identity and
reputation data becomes part of the payment transaction of
the collaborative consumption of the sharing economy of
paying and rating together.
One of the greatest concerns about digital payments has
been the invasion of privacy and the potential for hacking,
and ultimately theft. There is also tension regarding the
collection of payment data combined with geolocation and
other kinds of mobile telephony metadata created when
devices connect to networks. As it becomes an essential part
of the social payment experience, the status of personally
identifiable information is in flux and taking on new forms
of value. Even banks themselves now have their own
payment transfer and check cashing apps. For example, these
apps allow users to transfer money or take photos of checks
to immediately deposit them. These banking apps
increasingly use the biometric data sensors embedded within
mobile phones such as face or fingerprints locks to login to
accounts. Privacy and mobile media scholars have discussed
how this metadata can be used to infer social patterns and
movements, but also betray vulnerabilities of individuals
and the communities that they may move through [19, 20].
This new kind of locative media is a result of payment
transactions, user generated data, and mobile telephony
metadata, and supports a new kind of memory ecology and
sociality for payments —what Jordan Frith has called “a new
way to archive mobility” [21].
3 DATA AND METHOD
While the focus of this paper is on Venmo as social
media, our fieldwork and data collection forms part of larger
study on mobile receipts and social media data created in
mobile apps that support the transfer of payments. We are
currently in the process of collecting several years of Venmo
data directly via their API using a custom designed python
script deployed on Amazon AWS. This paper draws from
our in-progress data collection, and takes important steps to
build a conceptual understanding of Venmo, which is
necessary before conducting empirical work. Here we use
the walkthrough method of mobile apps to discuss the
experience and significance of the technology to social
media research [22]. Other research on Venmo has studied
social network ties and types of payments. However, we are
specifically interested in discussing how the Venmo public
transaction feed makes mobile payments and receipts of
those transactions unique social media data traces. Our case
study specifically examines issues with the social awareness
stream, known as the ‘public feed’. In carrying out this
study, we approached the Venmo payments platform as a
diverse but coherent category of social media.
4 HOW VENMO WORKS
Venmo started as social payments app in 2009 and is
available on iOS and Android. It is only available in the
United States and was PayPal acquired it in 2013 [23].
Venmo allows users to send or request payment from
contacts. It also allows users to store a credited balance in
the platform to use for future remittance or transfers, and
since 2016, has allowed users to pay merchants. Last year
the platform processed $9 billion USD in payments and is
increasingly expanding to merchants on the mobile web
(“Available at millions of stores on your phone”) [24]. In a
survey last year, LendEDU found that 65% of millennials
surveyed used a mobile payment and 44% of respondents
used Venmo [25].
After downloading the app, a user can set up an account
by signing up on their mobile device or a computer. Account
holders then verify both their phone numbers and email
address, then add and verify a bank account. Because Venmo
is only available in the US, users must have accounts with
US banks and mobile numbers, and their mobile devices
must be able to receive short code SMS messages because
transactions are confirmed via text message. Once a user has
set up an account they can invite friends, or allow the app to
access their contacts stored in their phone. The app syncs a
user’s address book with the network by searching for their
name, phone numbers, and email. A user may also allow the
app to connect to Facebook that allows their account icon
and complete friend list to be added as payment contacts
[26].
All payments on Venmo appear in a public transaction
feed and a user must opt out of the public feed in order to
make payments notifications private. The public feed does
not include the amount of money requested or paid, but
instead includes user names and a memo field that usually
includes a description of the transaction or charge. Users can
pay or charge other Venmo users that they do not have
personal information for by searching for their names; this
Venmo SMSociety, July 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark
has led to a number of fan practices such as charging Sean
Spicer for lying in a news conference, or scanning for
celebrity users and their transactions in the public feed. To
avoid paying the wrong user from the public directory and
facilitating faster contacts between users, Venmo recently
added a unique QR code to accounts so that users can scan
each other’s icon. The memo field to describe the type of
transaction is required to charge or remit payment, the user
is encouraged describe the payment, or interact with it by
‘faving’ it with a heart or commenting on it. The public feed
looks similar in kind and function to other social media
activity streams, such as Twitter or Instagram.
4 DISCUSSION
As we have discussed, social payments increase
sociability and playing with traditional notions of payment
through engagement and rating features in platforms. This
section outlines some critical interventions into thinking
about Venmo as an indicator of several factors of social
media: (1) That the boundaries between public and private
continue to be blurred and having transactional data, which
was previously something that is highly private, is accepted
as something that can be in the public sphere. (2) The
shifting boundary of what is private not only makes sharing
transactional interactions public possible but becomes a new
form of social communication that is ‘lite’ (i.e., it does not
take a large amount of effort), allowing new, playful
interactions, which we have very limited knowledge about.
Figure 1: Example of Venmo public feed payments from
vicemo.com.
(3) In terms of ethics and research design, Venmo itself does
not have much information about its API and what use is
permitted, which poses particular ethical challenges.
Various sites such as Vicemo (vicemo.com) regularly use
the public Venmo API feed to illustrate to jokingly illustrate
‘illicit’ activities paid for using Venmo (see Fig. 1), though
the tagging of payments cryptically has become part of the
vernacular for making payments ‘private’.
Money studies have found that people assign significance
and designate a variety of uses of monies based on its
origination, the way it is acquired, designated purpose, or
even its quantity. For example, splitting a pizza or a round
of drinks with friends may involve rounding up to $20 bill,
while $50 or $100 may be used for graduate gifts. Economic
sociologists have observed that in earmarking money,
people label transactions, whether paying bills or
entertainment, differently. These labeling practices and
mental accounting are grounded in social relations. We find
that the memo field of transactions is a way to earmark
payments and designate a range of different purposes—
ranging from bill pay, to entertainment, services, and settling
bets. Emoji is frequently used to describe Venmo
transactions, and the platform often features autofills text
with emoji. For example, searching ‘New Year’s Eve’ would
result in fireworks or champagne bottle. Starting a payment
memo with ‘Super’, for the Superbowl, autofill would
provide a number of different football game related emoji or
the team mascots (Fig. 2).
Figure 2: Example of Venmo Pay or Request transaction with
Emoji autofill suggestions for ‘Super’.
Emoji and texts may denote any number of meanings and, as
some labels suggest, they are a mechanism for users to create
their own codes. So, paying for pizza might be coded as
paying for drugs or strippers (Fig. 3). The actors involved in
the transaction either have the social cues to decipher the
message, or it has the intended perlocutionary effect on the
recipient. However, these messages take place in a public
sphere, and the coding might be part of a playful and social
attempt aimed at gaming the increasing public visibility of
transactional data (i.e., if our payment data is being posted
publicly, actors might as well interrupt the utility of these
SMSociety, July 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark Acker and Murthy
data being produced). It also might be the case that for social
researchers there may not be a discernible signal —in terms
of computational patterns— of emerging use, and that close
reading is necessary for interpretation. In other words, not
only is it transactional in nature (as payment), but also the
fact that one need only enter a couple of emoji might
provide, in some cases a backstage peek (c.f. Goffman, 1959)
into a person's everyday social, political, and economic life.
Indeed, even the act of categorizing transactions as
something illicit (e.g., drugs or sex) or otherwise obfuscated
might point to larger vernacular shifts that speak to new
forms of the social that are completely manifested in the
public eye, but not entirely comprehensible to those outside
of the particular social conversations. This is, of course, not
something unique to the context of payment, but is part of
being an insider in social communication. There are certain
norms of communication on Venmo following what Howard
Becker, a sociologist of deviance, saw as constituting groups
of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ [27]. In this way, there is a
certain, dominant norm of Venmo culture and then particular
subcultures that may be manifested in terms of emergent
forms of sociolinguistic expression. Non-Venmo users
become clear outsiders and face real challenges of trying to
decipher the types of communication occurring in Venmo.
Figure 3: Example of Venmo public feed payments of a user
filtered into the vicemo.com feed.
Another question these type of social payment systems
raise is whether they are interrupting the notion that splitting
payments is a challenge to overcome together in pairs or
groups. In the past, trying to calculate what everyone paid
real-time was always regarded as a mood killer and often
diners would just split their meal down the middle. As
Forbes argues, an incentive emerges for diners to just order
the most expensive item on the menu so they are not caught
subsidizing the meal [27]. With these payment-processing
platforms, not only is a social element added to splitting the
bill, but everyone has their phones out (a calculator brought
out by a dinner would have been considered anti-social in
the past). The act of quickly calculating one’s part of a bill
and sharing humorous emoji makes the bill splitting a pro-
social event.
This is not to say that aspects of bill payment have not
been traditionally pro-social (awkward stares or sardonic
jokes for example). However, calculating the bill often
involved picking straws and a ‘volunteer’ with the
unenviable task of making an approximation of what people
owed. Future payment systems may even auto split bills
with the server taking down a phone number with individual
orders. The site of payment, an activity usually charged with
non-social or even negative social aspects could be
considered, in some ways, to be flipped or transformed
through the social mediafication of payment processing.
Social media companies gamify payment, which encourages
consumptive practices. However, the shifts towards social
media-based payments also raise important questions on the
age-old sociological question that every transaction is social
in some way.
Beyond splitting bills or requesting payments in the
public feed, the issue of ‘timing’ of payment becomes
performative act in the public feed. Regardless of economic
systems, temporality has always had some impact on when
transactions are conducted. In modern capitalist systems,
wages received weekly, end of month, or bimonthly and we
hypothesize this is likely to influence spending patterns on
mobile payment systems, mirroring analog systems in times
past.
In addition, we may also have times of day when
transactions are posted more, completely unrelated to wages
or other traditional days of the week and month when
payments are made (such as splitting weekend entertainment
with friends). Unlike traditional point of sale (POS)
mechanisms, where the transaction would be recorded
immediately at point-of-sale, Venmo transactions are
sometimes occurring in situ. However, at other times
payments are occurring immediately post-facto, or at some
point post-facto. This complicates research as unlike other
forms of computational social science research, which would
use transaction times as a signal for when transactions are
occurring, it is likely problematic for us to merely look at
these data in these ways. In other words, we have to look at
these transactional data in different forms. Considering the
social aspects of these data, when transactions are posted
may indicate when individuals are doing social things that
involve payments with others. Additionally, more banal
shared payments like rent, utilities, or bills, have become
playful through the use of social media-based payments. In
the past, such transactions were perceived as mostly
transactional with shorter time scales, but the social aspect
of these payments makes the payment itself a social
interaction over time and with an audience, rather than
merely a payment between a buyer and seller.
6 IMPLICATIONS FOR STUDYING MOBILE
PAYMENT TECHNOLOGY AS SOCIAL MEDIA
We are witnessing a shift from payments existing largely
in the private sphere to more public, social media-based
interactions. Research on a under researched area such as a
Venmo SMSociety, July 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark
payment platform, generates immediate questions regarding
methods and best practice as there is not an established
literature, as with Twitter, which has systematic reviews of
subfields (e.g., Twitter and health research) [23]. We can
learn from initial, pioneering work on Twitter (e.g., Kwak,
Lee, Park, & Moon, 2010) [24], which did exploratory
scraping of Twitter to try to get a pulse of some of the data
emerging on the platform. We think that the same needs to
be done for initial work on Venmo. In addition, unlike
Twitter data, there is no regular archiving of these data, so in
the collection of data for research and providing empirical
observations we feel is important to preserve some of the
social interactions present on Venmo. Presently, all studied
payment data are publicly accessible on the Venmo API-
based feed. As a platform, Venmo is also unique in its far-
reaching public membership. There are even cases of
celebrities’ Venmo accounts being fully accessible without
being ‘Friends’ with them and the public at large is able to
see what transactions they have been involved with. This has
become harder now as public personalities have become
aware of the public nature of Venmo payments.
Ultimately, Venmo also speaks to larger sociological
discourses of knowing capitalism, a concept developed by
Nigel Thrift in which capitalism not only becomes more and
more pervasive, but “make[s] a business out of, thinking the
everyday.” According to Thrift: “It is also fun. People get
stuff from it – and not just more commodities. Capitalism
has a kind of crazy vitality. It doesn’t just line its pockets. It
also appeals to gut feelings. It gets involved in all kinds of
extravagant symbioses. It adds into the world as well as
subtracts [28].” Venmo is an example of users
‘enchantment’ with capitalism’s allures and as Thrift argues,
facilitates part of the performative aspects of capitalism [28].
Moreover, social media researchers could study these
types of data to understand the chips in capitalism sparked
by emergent social media platforms like Venmo. Savage and
Burrows have emphasized that these types of data are is
crucially important to the development of an accurate picture
of the social interactions of individuals in modern society
[26]. Specifically, one of the important aspects of why social
media researchers need to think more critically about the
types of data generated outside of Twitter, Facebook and
other regularly studied social media platforms, is that these
less studied platforms may provide new and candid insights.
Twitter, is not the same platform it was a decade ago,
specifically in terms of the presentation of selves on the
platform. Venmo’s trace data of transactions for paying the
water or electric bill, for example, might provide further
insight to our social lives.
7 CONCLUSIONS
In summary, in this paper we have explored the patterns
of using Venmo as social media. Venmo is just one example
of mobile payment technologies that have become
increasingly pervasive in everyday life. Other areas of recent
interest in payment technology include digital money,
cryptocurrencies, peer-to-peer lending, alternative
currencies, and financial literacy tools. This paper discusses
how social payment platforms, like Venmo, offer new
insights for social media researchers into the “social
mediafication” of common social transactions including
payments. One of them is to examine the earmarking with
emoji or signification of gifts from theories of special
monies. Another insight is to investigate what might be
called ‘financial social analytics’, or how social network
analysis approaches could be used to understand the
payment behaviors of groups or individuals, including social
ratings. Insights from social payments could give us more
information about how people build relationships, breakup,
start new jobs, donate to humanitarian causes, live with
housemates, to new forms entertainment in groups.
There is much to learn from the examination of the
Venmo payment transactions feed as social media, including
loose and close network ties and the value social payments.
Venmo social feed is a thus a new way to archive mobility,
what Frith calls “a new memory ecology” [21]. With social
payments gaining increased use, we are confronting a new
kind of social economic imaginary, and seeing the
emergence of new models of networked sociality for social
media cultures more broadly. This work has set out to show
that mobile payments could potentially reveal insights about
sociality and special monies, and the use of emoji as
payment earmarking expressions. Interpreting social
payments includes types of payments, and also how receipts
of transaction result in social and highly technically
mediated documents.
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